At its peak, Saturday Review was influential as the base of several widely read critics (e.g., Wilder Hobson, music critic Irving Kolodin, and theater critics John Mason Brown and Henry Hewes), and was often known by its initials as SR. It was never very profitable and eventually succumbed to the decline of general-interest magazines after restructuring and trying to reinvent itself more than once during the 1970s and 1980s.

Saturday Review reached its maximum circulation of 660,000 in 1971.[2]
Longtime editor Norman Cousins resigned when it was sold, along with McCall Books, to a group led by the two co-founders of Psychology Today, which they had recently sold to Boise Cascade. They split the magazine into four separate monthlies[6] and renamed the publishing company Saturday Review Press, but the experiment ended in insolvency two years later. Former editor Cousins purchased it and recombined the units with World, a new magazine he had started in the meantime. Briefly it was called SR World before it reverted to Saturday Review. Saturday Review Press was sold separately to E. P. Dutton. The magazine was sold in 1977 to a group led by Carll Tucker, who sold it in 1980 to Macro Communications, the owner of the business magazine Financial World. It was insolvent again in 1982 and was sold to Missouri entrepreneur Jeffrey Gluck. A new group of investors in 1984 resurrected it briefly. According to Greg Lindsay writing for Folio twenty years later, most people consider 1982 "the year Saturday Review died".

Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione acquired all properties in 1987 and used the title briefly from 1993 for an online publication at AOL.

In December 2010, business columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer Joseph N. DiStefano reported in his blog that John T. Elduff of JTE Multimedia planned to "revive" both Collier's and Saturday Review as print and online magazines — mainly print, "for Americans 55 to 90". Both would "have a liberal share of attention to research" and look like they did in the 1950s.[7]

In 2011, JTE Multimedia made use of the Saturday Review name with its Web site, Saturday Review–Drug Trials,[8] to report on clinical drug research, focusing on inconclusive and adverse trial results.[9] The site disappeared in 2016 with its home page essentially unchanged since its launch date.